Long gone are the days when a real estate agent could drum up deals with a few bus stop billboards and a good reputation around town. Especially in the current market, today’s agents need to be not only marketing-savvy, but technologically proficient, collaborative, and, perhaps above all, fast-movers.
Last year, SkySlope transaction management was used by over 2,000 agents who closed more than 12 deals (the 2022 NAR national average). Digging into the habits of these agents, we discovered three essential traits that helped them consistently close more deals while successfully meeting clients’ ever-growing expectations. Read on to learn what these habits are, plus, discover how you can help your own brokerage’s agents go from average performers to top performers.
1. Prioritize speed
In an industry powered by real-time marketplaces like Zillow, the ability to act fast is paramount to an agent’s success. In previous decades, physical speed — think of an agent showing up early to a broker’s open — may have cut it. But today, the internet outperforms physical speed on virtually every level.
Where agents can get an edge, then, is by speeding up the time it takes them to complete non-profit-generating tasks to maximize their time for revenue-generating activities like lead generation and networking. The less time an agent spends behind a desk completing paperwork, the more time they have to be out in the field, meeting potential clients and securing potential deals.
To speed up administrative tasks, agents should adopt automation. Small as it may seem, reducing keystrokes is critical to large-scale time savings. Solutions like smartphone apps and transaction management software that pre-populate data fields have the ability to drastically cut down on screen time, especially when used together.
2. Build trust
Return business and referrals are imperative to an agent becoming a top performer. What encourages clients to give an agent repeat business is almost as important as what doesn’t—namely: errors. Agents who make errors during the course of a transaction are far less likely to see return business, regardless of how personable they were. To reduce errors, agents should again turn to automation.
For less experienced agents, transaction management software that guides them through the transaction process from start to finish can prevent them from making errors. Some software can even be customized to a brokerage’s exact order of operations, offering additional safeguarding.
Automation can also help more tenured agents. Automation that reduces keystrokes by pre-filling data fields with information pulled directly from credited sources like the MLS further drives down the risk of entry typos. When agents make fewer errors, clients are more likely to initiate return business or recommend them to friends and family.
3. Maximize collaboration
Top producing agents aren’t lone wolves. Maintaining status as a top seller requires a team of real estate professionals who can support an agent’s back-end operations while the agent is interacting with clients. When agents are able to work collaboratively with others in their brokerage, their own bandwidth is increased for activities with fiscal potential.
Collaboration also boosts agent morale, providing agents with the incentive to “go the extra mile” for clients, which can result in more satisfied clients who give referrals.
The catch for agents is that any collaboration they do engage in needs to be traceable and transparent for compliance purposes. To assist with this, brokers should look for transaction management software embedded with compliant collaboration features. Software equipped with multiple levels of sharing access as well as trackers that document changes are ideal for supporting this.
The bottom line
To close more deals than the NAR average, today’s agents need to develop habits that help them maximize their time in front of clients. With the right technology solutions in place, agents can speed up time-consuming administrative tasks to give them more time for client-facing activities.
Finding the right time-saving technology doesn’t need to be difficult. SkySlope provides automation-powered solutions that can help agents develop all of the habits discussed today. To learn more about how SkySlope can help agents in your brokerage, visit us here.
